12 April 2012

Geometric/Floreale: The Fortunys

These geometiric flowers that are typical of Fortuny designs represent the union of Arabic and Western ideas. Geometry in Arabic science began as a series of symbolic forms, while Western artists used Euclidean principles to invent pictorial perspective. The difference can be represented by a flower. The Arabic flower was a visual image, an abstraction that could be known by studying refractted light. Whereas, the Western flower was an object in front of the eye, to be known through the gaze, the subject of much recent critical discussion.

Mention the Fortuny name and what comes to mind is a diaphanous pleated dress. The Delphos was named after an ancient Greek tunic and made from silk plissé fabric, using a technique for pleating fabric that they later patented. The Delphos dress and the Knossos scarf really did begin a revolution in fashion and, as we have remarked about Viennese reform attire, women were very much involved in changing the norms they dressed by. Fortuny and Negrin's ideas were shaped by the modern rethinking of Greek civilization that began after Heinrich Schliemann's archeological discoveries of the 1870s. Theorists turned from Athens to Crete, one result being heightened awareness of women's role in ancient Greece. In this context, it is ironic that Johann Jakob Bachofen, whose theory of 'mother right' has been largely discredited is more often cited than the more subtle semi-pagan speculations of the first British female academic, Jane Ellen Harrison, whose Prolegoma To The Study Of Greek Religion(1902) was a favorite college text of mine. We know now that Knossos, on the island of Crete is the oldest known European city, dating back to the Bronze Age.

"She was enveloped in one of those long, Oriental gauze scarves that the alchemist dyer Mariano Fortuny submerges in the mysterious potions of his caldrons, stirring them with a wooden stick, first like a sylph, then like a gnome, where he obtains colours from strange dreams and later prints them with his thousands of new generations of stars, plants, animals."

- Gabriele D'Annunzio wrote in Forse che si, forse che no (1910) on seeing Henriette wearing an early version of the dress.

"She" was Henriette Nigrin, an artist who supported herself as an artist's model in Paris, where she met Mariano Fortuny in 1897. Henriette eventually moved to Venice in 1902, becoming his business partner and designer. The Fortuny family disapproved of their relationship, so they did not marry for several years. Together, they designed textiles and, after World War I ended, opened their own production company on the Giudecca, still in operation today.

Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo, son, grandson, and nephew of respected Catalan painters, was born in 1871 in Granada. After his father's untimely death in 1874, the family moved to Paris, living with their uncle, the painter Raimundo Madrazo. Mariano's Parisian friends included Marcel Proust and the composer Reynaldo Hahn.
The family moved again, to Venice in 1892, to the Palazzo Orfei, now the home of Museo Fortuny. Among Mariano 's Venetian friends were Marchesa Casati anf the writers Gabriel d'Annunzio and Hugo von Hofmannsthal.
The young Fortuny expected to follow his father's vocation as a painter, but a visit to the annual Wagner Festival Bayreuth in 1893 convinced him that theatrical design offered a better scope for his talents. Eight years later, Fortuny designed the sets for the Italian premiere of Tristan and Isolde at La Scala (1901).

“The Fortuny dress Albertine wore that night seemed like the tantalizing shadow of invisible Venice. It was covered in Arab ornamentation just like Venice, just like Venetian palaces, disguised as sultans behind a veil pierced with stones, just like the bindings in the Ambrosian Library, just like the columns with Oriental birds that alternately mean life and death and are repeated in the mirage of the clothes, in a deep blue that, as my eyes approached it, became changeable, thanks to the same transmutations that, in front of the advancing gondola, became metal enflaming the azure of the Grand Canal. And the sleeves were lined in cherry pink that is so Venetian it is especially called Tiepolo pink."

- Marcel Proust, excerpted from La Prisonnière (1923), translated from the French by G. K. Scott-Moncrieff.

Poetic but not exaggerated, Proust's vignette of the delphos dress alluded to the Moorish influences in Fortuny designs. Granada, where Mariano Fortuny was born, a city on the Iberian Peninsula had been part of the Moorish Al-Andalus (now Andalusia). for eight centuries, from 711 to 1492.

Mariano Fortuny died in 1949 and was buried at the Verano in Rome next to his father. The Fortuny home was donated to the city of Venice to be maintained as a museum in 1956 by hsi widow, Henriette (Negrin) Fortuny.

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Why The Blue Lantern ?

A blue-shaded lamp served as the starboard light for writer Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette's imaginary journeys after she became too frail to leave her bedroom at the Palais Royale. Her invitation, extended to all, was "Regarde!" Look, see, wonder, accept, live.

"I think of myself as being in a line of work that goes back about twenty-five thousand years. My job has been finding the cave and holding the torch. Somebody has to be around to hold the flaming branch, and make sure there are enough pigments." - Calvin Tompkins